Sinhala Language Support for Java Micro Edition (SLS4JME) Ravimal Bandara Department of Statistics and Computer Science Faculty of Applied Sciences University Of Sri Jayewardenepura

Overview Introduction Design Features A Sample Application which use SLS4JME Limitations and Future Enhancements

Introduction There are several Sinhala mobile games and mobile applications developed in Sri Lanka. Most of them have used their own methods to show Sinhala characters, in their applications. This project focus the developers who develop localized mobile applications with J2ME Aim: help to reduce the additional effort to make their own Sinhala rendering system.

Design The library uses a bitmap font which maps with Sinhala character codes. The font faces and dimensions are immutable themselves. The library originally developed under CLDC 1.0 and MIDP 2.0 so it can be used with the same or later versions. Unicode　Sinhala Characters Map to ASCII Code Map to Character Images Assembles Character Images Output Sinhala Characters Sample Usage: Image　line = SinhalaRender.drawStringLine(“ලංකාව”, scrWidth);

Features • Works with Sinhala Unicode characters. • Can render a mixture of Sinhala and English characters. • Less memory consuming and even the size is smaller than a Sinhala Unicode true type font file. (<50kb) • Can be used with low level API i.e. Canvas and Graphics. • Flexible: texts can be located any given coordinate on the screen. • Text wrapping and line spacing can be done manually. • Completely independent from the native character rendering system.

A Sample Application which use SLS4JME Sinhala RSS Reader for Mobile Devices Having a Sinhala compatible RSS reader in a mobile device can increase the usage of local language in the cyber space. The rendering of Sinhala characters of this mobile application have been done using SLS4JME. In this RSS reader there are several custom made UI components which have been made with the aid of SLS4JME.

Limitations and Future Enhancements The library SLS4JME currently supports only the output. Still there is no proper method has developed for the character input purpose. And hence the next step of this library will be the implementation of a proper Sinhala input method. It will expand the ability of making Sinhala supported custom UI components in J2ME mobile applications.

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